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Comment by utopiah | Hacker News Reader

Well that's the point, you do want information in and out, including the ability to send instructions. Call it "smart" or "connected" or whatever marketing words you prefer, the point is having affordances that give you agency.

So yes I insist you do want those, just not in the way it's been currently forced. IMHO you are right to reject this as it is but wrong to reject the possibilities when done right.

We are just so disgusted by the way it's currently done that we reject the entire possibly. Quite sad really.

Edit: I have been using HA daily for years now. Smart plugs work and are useful but it's rarely enough. You can infer the device state based on instant consumption but you can't convenient control back.

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I think I agree with the parent more. For one, not all "smart" appliances are made equal. You can see the appeal of some of them if there was no customer abuse, like with smart TVs. But things like smart microwaves are a harder sell. In practice, lots of smart devices are made with one purpose - to remove methods of configuring it on-device and instead forcing you into using the manufacturer's app. Many of them offer no benefits over their non-smart equivalents, and whatever benefits are there are usually solutions in search of a problem.

And I think their point is that, even with strong legislation, giving every device unlimited internet connectivity is a siren song for the corporations which will always be incentivized to shoehorn their interests into the product you own. Things like control through external connectors, on-device modifiable configurations, only local connectivity or flashable firmware would not qualify as 'smart' but would go a long way to do the things you're looking for without giving them the physical possibility of future abuse.

Internet connectivity as a requirement is an instant red flag ... but it doesn't mean we should have appliances we can't control.

This false dichotomy is precisely the problem. I DO want to program my hardware, even ones with actuators, but I do NOT want for this to happen to rely on the infrastructure of the manufacturer if I don't explicit ask for it.

I have a speech recognition standing fan with touch button. Its terrible. The voice is loud, the touch controls dont register very well, give me a dumb thing with physical buttons please!

I'm not advocating for touchless smart devices, I'm advocating for optional interface we can use to operate our appliances without having to rely on the manufacturers app and/or server.

But that's the problem: as soon as you move control inwards to the software, and add more accessibility (smart watch, voice control, whatever), you have a sophisticated, hidden control layer.

How do you know that your dryer won't lock onto an open wifi? How do you know that your smart TV won't download malware? You don't.

Contrarily, if you accept that you only hear the dryer "DONE!" bell if you are within 20' or so, you can be certain that the dryer is yours and yours alone.

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